Our fourth player was never really into the game, so we dropped it down to three, rather than everyone pitching in on a dummy player. So far, we aced all the summer months, little to no problems. Four players seems to stretch your resources thin more than a tight three player round, though it could be we've just been picking OP characters.

Pandemic is always easier with fewer players, mostly because each player gets proportionally more cards so it's easier to find cures. It was true in the base game and it's been true of what I've played of Legacy Season 1 so far. In the first 6 months, our group of three hasn't lost a single round.

Weíre up to October in Season 1 after losing both games in September post reveal. Our traitor was the Quarantine Specialist, who we used pretty heavily. Weíve just been getting slaughtered by poor city draws and outbreaks, especially when the cities with 3 cubes/Faded are rated 4 or 5 already.

Still fun. I tried a desperate gambit last game to get us enough turns to finish our objective by self-sacrificing and taking a scar, but it only saved us one turn, and still got outbreaked to death.

Finished Season Two tonight. It was... fine. I liked Season One better. The game does not have the craziness that Season One has. The experience is less spiky, which limits excitement but play/objectives are MUCH different than S1, so it is a nice change of pace.

Exploring the world is fun, and I like the way the game handles upgrades better. As a complaint, there is a LOT of scratch cards and they are messy.

Mild spoilers:

We technically lost the game in December (we decided on the second half of December to restart the game before even playing a turn as the game gave us six plague cubes during set up); we hadnít used the inoculate action at all, and in hindsight it almost certainly made the game more difficult for us as it added an immense amount of luck to the game, as both the player and infection decks became massive.

So Iím summary, pay close attention to your free actions, and if you play, inoculate the shit out of everything (maybe).

We've played our first game now. No spoilers follow -- you won't find anything below that you couldn't see by opening the box -- but as always, you shouldn't be reading this if you want an "untainted" PL2 experience.

I appreciate how much they mixed up the formula for season 2. Season 1 was "Pandemic with a plot." Season 2 is very different even from the start. Even just having multiple copies of each city in the infection deck drastically shakes up the strategy.

Because there were only three colors, I underestimated the difficulty of getting five of a color. We should probably have played a prologue/tutorial game before leaping in, but who's got time for that? We got wrecked. With two turns left to go, we had a plan to get the cards we needed, but we lost to outbreaks ("incidents" now, I guess) before that could happen. We at least managed to recon before the end, which will help us for Late January.

Rules question: I played as the role that can give/take supplies at distance. Does this really mean that you can completely and freely redistribute everyone's supplies on your turn?

Pandemic is always easier with fewer players, mostly because each player gets proportionally more cards so it's easier to find cures. It was true in the base game and it's been true of what I've played of Legacy Season 1 so far. In the first 6 months, our group of three hasn't lost a single round.

Can somebody remind me where pride goes again? We had our triennial Pandemic Legacy meetup over Christmas and experienced our first loss in July. The hilarious thing is that we narrowly prevented a game-ending triple outbreak...only to immediately lose to a game-ending quadruple outbreak that completely blindsided us. As a result, there's a pretty big chunk of Asia that's doing significantly worse than it was before! Anyway, we lost the first game, but we did manage to find the virologist, which is probably what caused our loss in the first place. Thankfully, finding a missing person carries over even if you lose, so we didn't have to deal with that for our second attempt and we won it handily. I can't even claim to be too mad about the loss - the campaign had been going too well and it was starting to feel like there wasn't enough tension. We'll see whether this was an isolated incident next time we play...which will be in May.

One overlooked rule in Season 1 that I think caused my group to win more than we should have: After CODA's been revealed, or maybe after it's mutated to zombie form, if you pull a player card with the same color as CODA, and that city doesn't have a zombie, place one on it. We played a few games where the CODA color wasn't a problem at all just due to the Infection Deck shuffle, but this rule it would have gotten much more dangerous around South America/Africa for us.

We're still languishing around October I think, schedules haven't been good to play.

One overlooked rule in Season 1 that I think caused my group to win more than we should have: After CODA's been revealed, or maybe after it's mutated to zombie form, if you pull a player card with the same color as CODA, and that city doesn't have a zombie, place one on it. We played a few games where the CODA color wasn't a problem at all just due to the Infection Deck shuffle, but this rule it would have gotten much more dangerous around South America/Africa for us.

We're still languishing around October I think, schedules haven't been good to play.

The bolded bit (in the spoilers) is wrong here, actually. The only time you ignore that rule is if it would be the fourth zombie in the city.
In that case, you don't place and there's no outbreak.

We did not do great. Ended up with 375 points, right on the bubble between Collapse and the next option. We nuked a city, weren't successful at finding patient zero, and opened up all boxes. We did successfully complete each objective in December, though it took until the last half of the month. Not finding Patient Zero really hurt us, but we had horrible card draws for some of those.

All together a good game, though the bloom's a bit off the rose on Legacy titles for me. They're certainly interesting, but the fun is mostly in the reveal.
It also took us an actual year to get through Year One, though with our kids getting older it's easier to schedule game time without worrying they're killing each other as much.

That said, I've still got Risk Legacy, Pandemic Season 2, Seafall, and Gloomhaven all waiting in the wings.

Overall I think it was absolutely a better experience than Season 1. Season 1 is very, very caught up in the idea of being both Pandemic and a Legacy game, so you have to constantly play an entire game of Pandemic and deal with the game's constant need to remind you that you're playing a Legacy game, and Legacy games change things and introduce new rules.

End-game spoilers follow.

The supplies mechanic was super clever. In some ways it felt like "reverse Pandemic", which is appropriate since you're playing the surviving Faded. We'd actually prepared for Season 2 by playing a bunch of Pandemic: Iberia, and the overlap in concepts and strategies served us very well.

The Legacy elements were also very well-crafted, in that they were pretty much all anchored in the basic stuff that you learned during the prologue, just remixed. You're always building sets of colored cards, you're just using them differently - recon, The Plan, or the final journey. You're always dealing with infections, but the Hollow Men are both an added threat (since they impede movement) and a reprieve (since they don't burn supplies or advance the Incident track). There's a lot of strategy involved in how and when you link up cities - we were very conservative about it, but still ended the game with only 2 cities unlinked and only 5 fallen. And the narrative did a superb job at hinting at where to focus your energies; we found one lab before we clued in to the hints, and then knew exactly where to go for the remaining labs and exactly which frequencies mattered.

Our Season 1 game wound up being accidentally Very Hard Mode when we got C0D4: Blue, meaning that our original starting area turned into a difficult-to-access zombie wasteland in short order. We scratched off everything after we won, and the catch-up mechanics seemed very carefully tuned. If you fall behind, they bring you up to speed, but you lose a small edge. I think I'd prefer the opposite design - if you need the catch-up mechanics, your score is already suffering, so the game should make itself easier - but the spread seemed much narrower.

We've explored North America and South America, having connected all of NA except Mexico City and having made a foray from Buenos Aires to Lima in SA. The game very heavily hints that you want to have SA explored by now, so we made it a priority in March.

April is just the point where the game goes "Oh hey, have extra Epidemic cards! Here's two more right now with more to come! Hooray!" while cutting your starting supplies further. (Not a spoiler, it's right there on the game board from the start.)

We're thinking next game we'll have to bring in the Immunologist, just so he can spend a couple turns pulling supplies out of the reserve and getting them back in play. Do we have the action economy to pull that off? Probably not! With that plan we'll want to keep the guy who can redistribute supplies to everyone for free on his turn, but that means we shed either the guy who can move people across the map, the person who gets to create more supplies for free, or the guy who's really good at swapping cards. Which is a tough call!

The second Lab to reach is out in the middle of Russia, so I'm thinking we'd better explore out of London next to get whatever tiny boon it is you get for finding a path out to a new lab.

We did get a kick out of the card with two scratch-off windows, one of which you're instructed to reveal immediately and the other goes unmentioned at any point. One of us scratched off the other field and it just read "We never told you to scratch off this part."

Got to play a couple more rounds with my family after Christmas and we're nearing the end, with only November and December left to go. The first round was our first with a fourth player since we started the campaign, as my brother was visiting from BC and he was interested in giving it a shot. I've always found Pandemic to be more difficult as you add players, and September was no exception. We decided to focus on completing the second of the searches and we literally came as close to losing as you possibly can before pulling off a win. I had tallied up how many cards were left in the draw pile and realized we only had one more set of turns to cure the last disease, but at every turn it seemed like we were one move short of being able to pull it off. What's more, our CODA zone was in a really bad way and we'd had 7 outbreaks, which meant that one bad infection card would end the game before we even finished off the draw pile. As we neared the end it looked hopeless, but my cousin wouldn't give up, eventually piecing together an elaborate plan to save that day that would only work if we could keep that last outbreak from happening. Somehow, we managed to pull every single city EXCEPT for the one that would have finished us off, and the day was saved with one card remaining on the draw pile. The last turn was like the final minutes of the Stanley Cup finals, we literally stood up and cheered out loud as we flipped over infection cards and managed to dodge bullet after bullet. Definitely the best session of the game that we've had so far.

Of course, later that night my cousin texted me that he'd realized we'd been making the same rules mistake as John:

Quote:

Originally Posted by John

One overlooked rule in Season 1 that I think caused my group to win more than we should have: After CODA's been revealed, or maybe after it's mutated to zombie form, if you pull a player card with the same color as CODA[...]place one on it.

So in the end, we would absolutely have lost that game had we played things legit. Oh well, it was still a hell of a night. And I doubt I'll forget about this when we finally sit down to finish the campaign... about 5 months from now.

Yeah, a little circular sicker on each of them would probably have been enough to jog our memories. Oh well, even the game acknowledges that you are probably going to forget some rules from time to time and the official solution is :shrug emoticon;

Weíre one game away from completing Season 2, in the back half of December.

The ďbring the ring to MordorĒ mechanic is interesting. Weíre horrible players, didnít focus on finding the labs until the last game, which wouldíve made at least the last 6 months of game time easier. My other players donít care too much about the story, they just want to use the tried and true strategies that end up squeaking us by half the time.

One mechanic we didnít use at all was filling up Box 6 with infection cards. We were too scared that it would end up being bad for us in the end, so we were wary. Turns out it wouldíve helped us out, with minimal downside. Oh well.

After this, Iíve got three other Legacy games that I could introduce: Risk, Gloomhaven, and Seafall. Iíve heard bad things about Seafall, and Gloomhaven may take some effort to introduce, so I may try Risk. Itíll be fun to play a competitive game again, even if a 3 player game isnít ideal.

After this, Iíve got three other Legacy games that I could introduce: Risk, Gloomhaven, and Seafall. Iíve heard bad things about Seafall, and Gloomhaven may take some effort to introduce, so I may try Risk. Itíll be fun to play a competitive game again, even if a 3 player game isnít ideal.

Yeah, don't play Seafall. The thing that I love about Pandemic Legacy is that it started with an established good game and then went from there. Seafall seems to have worked backwards and the less "complete" games aren't super interesting. It also has a weird pace where it seems like everything is slowly plodding along and then the game is over.

I haven't played Gloomhaven, but I've played a few games of Risk. The caveat on the latter is that you have to like Risk to begin with and some people are violently averse to it.

We finished Season 2 tonight (Frodo dropped the ring no prob, but we were 3/5 on the chart of how well we did) and jumped into Risk. Itís a little refreshing that the legacy elements are light, at least to start. Pandemic season 2 ended up getting a little overburdened with the lore and the mechanics, especially by the end.

One thing to know, since the game is 8 years old now, some of the stickers are dried out now. We had to grab some glue for a couple of the scars.